blossom bites need bees: 2009

2009-05-07

freshly ground

i drank too much coffee this morning. shit.

i think my body my explode.

in the meantime, i sit here browsing. it's been like 45 minutes since i actually did any work

i have so many rich babies to sign up for music classes!

betsy walton

2009-03-05

comm-unity

really incredible photography project by Richard Renaldi, "Touching Strangers".
he asks strangers to pose with each other, touching...in case the title didn't give it away.

there's a really striking sort of intimacy expressed through their discomfort that is so incredibly moving.

the post on in such a world where i found this is worth reading.

2009-02-23

growing sprouts

akasha rabut

via booooooom, which is so good

2009-02-10

andrea bowers

check this

manon de boer (has my secret namesake, but also) did this really fabulous john cage video piece that was at the kw institute during the berlin biennale that i feel nostalgic for and want to see again but cannot find. but i found that up there and it's a pretty wicked project. it reminded me of how i was talking about my dear friend leah yesterday who thinks so carefully about the words she uses thus sometimes coming at you with language that seems a little unusual, but almost consistently managing to say exactly what she means. the panoramic portraits project experiments with a new semantic relationship between the syntax of communication and pragmatics...maybe? it's definitely an interesting way to draw attention to potential that exists within a new framework of language that is combined with an important structural/visual component. useful for description. do we really want to get better at description though? maybe since the visual component allows for more interpretation within the way the language intends to be used, some mystery remains...hmm...

probably more important is how the internet is such an interesting venue for organization! ah! what a wealth of information about people; the bits they leave behind themselves, the stuff recorded by others, where it comes from, the relation to their physical existence in space, the removal from any necessary relationship to place. mapped together, is our internet presence the most accurate representation of us?

also, i updated this a little

2009-01-17

my room has no heat

zachary rossman

found one reason to like the extreme cold weather here right now - sublimation. the sidewalks are way less wet and slippy thanks to this underrated endothermic phase transition.

ps - my area of toronto was part of the 25% w/o power for the full 24 hours ending at 10 pm yesterday. it was chilly.

2009-01-12

"food as Barbie"

i went to the Ethnography Through Film festival at McGill a couple years ago with Leah and Gianna on the 'food production' night. i've talked a lot about the films we watched that night since then and i just just just found the one i thought was especially interesting, online. Our Daily Bread looks at food production in Europe using a soundtrack of massive machines that interrupt the food we eat on its way from seed/birth to our stomach and shots that mirror the best from films you'll probably recognize (i.e. the shot of the sunflower fields and that one above). the combination of which manages to humanize everything in the film except for the humans.

it's a really, really good film.

after we watched it, we got a warning from the moderator (or whatever we should call her...she was associated with the film history dept. at Concordia, I believe) about how gruesome the next film was. Le Sang des Betes is a doc about a slaughterhouse in France in 1949. fully scored and with jaunty narration, there's lots and lots of blood.

honestly though, all the sterile shots of modern day slaughterhouses you see in Our Daily Bread are much more disturbing.

for your viewing pleasure: Our Daily Bread, Le Sang des Betes